Adorable stop motion celebrates Hello Kitty's 40th anniversary

Commissioned by Sanrio and The Japanese American National Museum, TADO were asked to create this animation to celebrate Hello Kitty's 40th anniversary. Taking about two months to complete, everything was created in TADO's basement in Sheffield, with a bit of help from their friends Alex Veitch (lighting advisor), Nick Hunter (wood-wizard) and Ben Ridley (music and sound design).

"We've been producing wooden figures for a few years now, and to move these into animation was a natural progression for us," they explain. "We'd not done stop motion in any form before so we quickly began designing the characters and building mock ups and test rigs to see how to incorporate the joints and wires into the wooden shapes."

"We used a combination of ball-joints and wire, with hand-caved and laser-cut wood sections to create the puppets. The biggest challenges were fitting the joints into the sections whilst keeping the scale of the characters and proportions correct to our sketches. The set was made from foam, wood, cardboard."

The characters, set and animation are now on display at the 'Hello' 40th Anniversary exhibition at the Japanese American Museum in Los Angeles until April 2015.

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